Polygamy Rising

Marriage is defined as the legal union of one man and one woman. That’s what a marriage is. Every adult not already married has the right to marry. As a matter of law every adult male has the right to marry the woman of his choice and every adult female has the right to marry the man of her choice. So no adult is denied the right to marry.

Many adults choose to not marry; they choose to “play the field,” or they lack the temperament for marriage, or they never met the “right” person, or they simply don’t like the other gender. People choose to marry for all sorts of reasons; love is only one of those reasons. One of every five male homosexuals will marry the woman of his choice; one of every three lesbians will marry the man of her choice; these unions often produce children. So every American has always had an equal right to partake of the social institution defined as a marriage – the union of one man and one woman.

Homosexuals have never been denied the right to marry; they have simply chosen to not marry; they are now clamoring for the invention of a new social institution and they want everyone else to pretend that this new institution is also a marriage just like the traditional institution everyone else calls marriage. Their neediness is endearing, but every same-sex union will always be one genuine sex organ short of being the union of two complements which is the defining feature of a marriage – it is the marrying of two complements that is the essence of this institution. Any other arrangement is just a marriage parody.

Subverting Marriage

When, in the case Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court decided that a Texas anti-sodomy law “furthers no legitimate state interest” that could justify limiting consensual adult homosexual behaviors, the Court undermined the legitimacy of the majority’s moral convictions as a justification for legislation controlling adult sexual conduct. It is also worth noting that “unconstitutional” does not mean “unwise.” State and local laws have the virtue of mirroring the moral sensibilities of the local and regional cultures; legislators can modify these laws to reflect changing moral sensibilities without creating, as courts do, sweeping principles that can wash away the moral guardrails and lane markers that communities consider defining features of their regional cultures.

The state’s interest in protecting its central organizing institution, marriage, was once sufficient justification for upholding or striking down laws that touched on the private matters of consenting adults. All of that changed with the Roe v. Wade decision which replaced the protection of marriage with “personal choice” as the important interest to be defended. Once each citizen became a moral arbiter unto himself, unmoored from the moral conventions of his community, then by what principle is any consensual adult sexual behavior not a constitutionally-protected behavior? With the community’s moral guardrails washed away, what possible legal defense is there against plural marriage?

There is no such defense. If gays think they can break the alternative-marriage barrier with two new alternative-marriage modalities, gay-male wedlock and lesbian wedlock, and then pull the ladder up after themselves, then the homosexuals have another think coming!

All the voters of Maine, Maryland and Washington who voted to redefine marriage and make that venerable cornerstone of Western culture “more inclusive” and all of the voters of Minnesota who rejected a proposed amendment to their state constitution that would have preserved the ancient definition of marriage and all of the gay-pride warriors who pushed for one-sex wedlock were unintentional foot soldiers for the Next Big Thing: polygamy. Yup, gay marriage is totally last week.

Now that gays have convinced the clueless in three states that the gender aspect of the traditional definition of marriage (man/woman) is “discriminatory,” those states have lost any possible defense against the human right to plural marriage by arguing that the number aspect (one/one) of the traditional definition is somehow still sacrosanct. The sentimental vote for gay marriage was also a vote for plural marriage; foolish voters were just too stupid to know it.

So . . . Now that homosexuals and their liberal enablers have established homosexual wedlock as a legal reality in America, it’s high time to get on with the business of considering those other novelty marriage permutations that are now legally inevitable.

The ancient and time-honored institution of heterosexual marriage was created to idealize the complementary emotional chemistry and mutual inter-dependence of the two complementary genders that comprise 97% of humanity: normal men and women. This institution has proven itself to be the best environment in which to nurture future generations and to protect the interests of vulnerable mothers. It continues to be the best way to tame the wayward nature of men and to focus their minds on building healthy families. But suddenly two profoundly different institutions have been given the same legal status as traditional marriage and also been granted the name “marriage.” Both of these distinctly different institutions are biological dead ends; neither could be the natural source of new life. Likewise, neither of these novel marriage modalities is capable of modeling the nuanced interplay of man and woman that is every normal child’s birthright. Most of the children in gay households were born in a previous marriage in which a lesbian defrauded and victimized a man who was deceived into believing that his bride was a genuine woman. One of every five male homosexuals will pull this same dirty trick, cheating some woman out of her dreams, her youth and her innocence. The American divorce rate is inflated by homosexuals who impersonate normal adults. A case in point is the former governor of my home state, Jim McGreevey, who callously swindled two women out of their hopes and their dreams and then left each of them with a daughter and a grinning, “Good-bye.” Jim’s real passion was for anonymous anal sex with total strangers behind dumpsters at rest stops along the New Jersey Turnpike. After he was exposed, Jim declared himself to be a proud gay American and he was instantly embraced by the “gay community.”

Because the human natures of males and females are distinctive, any social institution that encapsulates only male proclivities will exaggerate those proclivities and any institution that encapsulates only female proclivities will exaggerate those proclivities in contradistinction to heterosexual unions where the proclivities of male and female temper and modify one another. These distinctive pairings of gender proclivities predestines each of these three social institutions to be a distinctly different institution. Each encapsulates a distinctly different human chemistry. In a future America in which homosexuals have been given everything they want, gays and lesbians will socialize by accident because their only incentive for socializing now is political; they have no natural attraction for one another; their erotic compasses point in opposite directions.

The Next Big Thing

With gay marriage in the rear-view mirror, the next big marriage fashion will be plural marriage. Every argument that homosexuals offered as a justification for homosexual wedlock can also be made for heterosexual plural marriage, with the difference that the arguments for heterosexual polygamy are stronger and utterly untainted by the deceptions that characterized the gay-marriage campaign.

The word polygamy is derived from the Greek words polys gamos for “many married.” There are varieties of polygamy. When a man is married to more than one wife at once, the relationship is called polygyny and there is no marriage bond between the wives. When a woman is married to more than one husband at once the relationship is called polyandry and there is no marriage bond between the husbands. A marriage that includes several husbands and several wives is called group marriage. Polygyny is the most common polygamous relationship. Of the 1,231 societies noted in the Ethnographic Atlas Codebook 186 were monogamous, 453 included occasional polygamy, 588 included more frequent polygyny and 4 included polyandry. In the nation of Senegal, for example, nearly 47% of marriages are multiple marriages. Islam permits a man to have as many as four wives if he can support them equally. Current American immigration law now favors immigration from the non-Christian and polygamous parts of the world. Likewise, the pre-Christian traditions of the Celtic pagans included polygamy – a custom that lingered on after Christianization. The Brehon Laws of Gaelic Ireland explicitly embraced polygamy. Modern Celtic pagan religions continue this tradition.

Saint Augustine struggled to square the polygamy of the Old Testament patriarchs with the Christian commitment to heterosexual monogamy; he argued that the polygyny of the patriarchs was tolerated by the Creator to encourage procreation. He reminds us that heterosexual monogamy was confirmed by Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew (Mat. 19:9) and His presence at the wedding in Cana (John 2:2).

Utah and eight other states have deemed polygamy to be a crime, while 49 states have bigamy statutes that can be bent for use against plural families. Bigamy statutes were instituted to protect spouses, usually wives, from marriage fraud, as when a man marries a second wife without informing her that he is already married. Polygamy, by contrast, is usually the marriage of one man to more than one wife with the full knowledge of everyone involved. Ever since the Supreme Court decriminalized all adult consensual homosexual behaviors with its 2003 Lawrence decision, Americans have been free from the fear of prosecution for their chosen social relations, with the single exception of one group of consenting adults: polygamists. Certainly this group of religiously-motivated normal heterosexuals is more deserving of the term “oppressed minority” than are homosexuals who are distinguished by no more than a quirky sexual proclivity.

Monogamists, including homosexual monogamists, have struck a pose of urbane superiority when confronted by the issue of polygamist rights, as though the rights of those they have deemed to be their social inferiors are rights not worth defending. In truth, if all the ways of living and all the ways of loving were ranked according to their social utility and their capacity to strengthen the core values of traditional American culture, then most polygamous unions would beat any homosexual coupling hands down.

A few polygamists have exploited the secrecy necessary to preserve their families as a cloak behind which to become a law unto themselves; they have violated age-of-consent laws; they have instigated forced marriages. The notorious renegade Warren Jeffs, convicted of conspiracy to commit rape for forcing a 14-year-old girl to marry her 19-year-old cousin, is a case in point. But Jeffs is not typical of anything; his influence over others would have been diminished if polygamy were not a furtive lifestyle lived in the shadows. Decriminalizing polygamy would go a long way toward bringing polygamy into the sunlight where abusers like Warren Jeffs would have no place to hide. It is not unusual for monogamist Americans to have several partners during their lifetimes. It is only illegal for an American to do so all at once. Why?

Polygamist women have websites. They want you to know that they are as free to leave their culture as the women of any other culture. For many of them the problems of monogamous society highlights the strengths of their polygamous culture. The needs of their families are met by several adults working together, which enhances the chances of family success. They are not ignorant of the world around them; they have telephones and computers and automobiles. They work; they own businesses; they go to college. Their children write touching testimonials about the warmth and the security and the guidance they received from the mothers who raised them.

The popular belief that polygamy is all about older men taking much younger wives is a misperception. Young women in polygamous communities are free to choose their husbands. Many prefer a younger spouse; some couples prefer to remain monogamous. Some young women choose older husbands because they believe a mature and established man will enhance her chances of having a successful marriage.

Polygamists are, by necessity, reclusive – kept “in the closet” by the negative judgments of monogamists and by the fear of a rare prosecution. The only times polygamists capture our attention is when they make the news, which is the reason most Americans associate polygamy with breakaway Mormon splinter sects such as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which attracted our attention in 2006.

Mainstream Mormonism stopped consecrating polygamous unions in 1890 as a pre-condition to Utah’s statehood, but pockets of adherents persisted. In 1953 the state of Arizona arrested all the men of a 385-member polygamous enclave that straddled its border with Utah. All of the children were placed in foster homes. A judge eventually ruled this overbearing state action to be illegal and the polygamists returned to their homes. By 2007 their community numbered ten thousand.

“Utah is a sanctuary for polygamists,” said Jay Beswick, an observer of the FLDS as a children’s rights advocate. “I don’t recall ever seeing Utah as having the willpower to go after polygamy. It’s just beyond their capacity.” (Los Angles Times, 2007)

The Utah state’s attorney general, Mark Shurtleff said his office would not prosecute people solely for multiple marriages. He conceded that with 37,000 residents in polygamous marriages, the task would be impossible. “Any time a prosecutor is considering a series of crimes, you have to consider your resources,” he added. “We’ve got 4,000 jail beds in the state. They’d overwhelm them.”

Back in 2002, Sam Barlow, then the marshal of FLDS-controlled Colorado City, Arizona, had declare to believers that,

“We have challenged them [state authorities] on whether or not in a country where the Congress can make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise, whether a legislature can pre-determine at what age a person can make a religious covenant.”

A recording of Barlow’s statement of belief was played at the trial of Warren Jeffs.

The state has a legitimate interest in protecting underage young people. But this case begs the question: wouldn’t these children be better protected if this community wasn’t so isolated from the rest of society? There is no necessary contradiction between polygamy and age-of-consent laws. There can be polygamy without child brides, as most polygamous marriages demonstrate.

As homosexual wedlock gets a foothold, let us not forget that during the early less-organized and less-disciplined years of the Gay Movement, it was always homosexuals who were the vocal vanguard of the effort to abolish all age-of-consent laws. Before the advent of the lavishly funded and Internet-coordinated gay movement that cautioned gays against excessive candor, every display of gay pride reserved an honored place for NAMBLA, the North American Man-Boy Love Association. Back then every pederast was a gay in good standing. Nothing about gay psychology has changed since then; gays are just more adept at not shocking normal people with the truth.

If you remember nothing else, remember this: the notion that gays are an oppressed minority is new. It was invented by a homosexual member of the American Communist Party who sat down at his kitchen table one evening in 1946 and re-imagined homosexuals as Karl Marx might have imagined gays if Karl Marx had been gay. This commie’s name was Harry Hay. Harry was one of those dirt-bag gays who had married a woman and adopted two daughters to conceal his homosexuality. The Communist Party disapproved of homosexuality; they considered it an artifact of bourgeois capitalist societies.

The first year that the newly media-savvy gay community banned NAMBLA from its big Gay Pride Parade, Harry Hay walked the parade route wearing a sandwich board that read “NAMBLA Walks with Me.” Harry was the only honest gay in a parade of hypocrites.

In gross figures the number of illegal sexual acts involving gay and straight males and underage young people is roughly comparable. This is the basis of the gay propagandist’s claim that gays are no more likely to initiate sexual contact with an underage person than is a straight male. But when we consider the fact that straights are 97% of the male population and that gays are a tiny 3% of the male population, gays don’t look so good. In fact, a minute of number crunching on a two-dollar calculator using FBI crime statistics reveals that any gay selected at random is statistically eighteen times more likely to sexually menace a youngster than is a similarly-selected straight guy.

It was right in the middle of the gay community’s full-throated denunciation the Boy Scouts of America for its policy of not allowing openly homosexual males to share tents with young boys that we were slapped with the grotesque revelation that homosexual priests had molested over ten thousand altar boys. The toxic touch of these homosexuals had ruined countless lives and damaged countless marriages. The gay community desperately tried to deflect our attention by coining the misleading moniker “pedophile priest” as though these monsters were not “really” average homosexuals or even homosexuals at all. But the defining line for pedophilia isn’t the age of consent, it’s puberty! So all those thousands of homosexuals who were forcing their sexual deviations on 14, 15, 16 and 17-year-olds were not pedophiles; they were just gays being gay.

The venerable Catholic Church has fallen into disrepute because its guardians allowed the Church to be colonized by a morally-alien and toxic gay culture. The health of any Christian institution would be diminished by so many in-dwelling parasites. More recently we learned that the Boy Scouts of America had kept a secret “pervert” file of cases going back decades, list of homosexual scout leaders who had molested Scouts entrusted to their care.

And yet . . . the voters of Maine, Maryland and Washington have given gays the green light to encroach on the venerable institution of marriage, to redefine it beyond recognition and to present themselves to the world as “just like everyone else.” What possible argument could be presented now against the growing push for heterosexual polygamous marriage?

As immigration from the non-Christian and anti-Christian parts of the world continues unchecked so does the influx of polygamous animists, Africans and Muslims. They’re here; they’re not queer; get used to it! What will be the liberal voters response to heterosexual polygamists, or gay plural-marriage enthusiasts for that matter, who point out that the number aspect of the traditional definition of marriage is no more special than the gender aspect of the definition. The dolts in Washington, Maine and Maryland have opened the door for polygamy, probably polygyny first, but later gay and straight group marriage, with all the taxpayer-funded benefits that the gays keep lusting after.

The popular perception that polygamy is just a “Mormon thing” is disproved by increasing reports of polygamy in America. Liberal immigration policies have made America a haven for upwardly-mobile polygamists.

On March 7, 2007 a fatal fire in a Bronx row house killed one woman and nine children of two families from Mali. The house was owned by Moussa Magassa, a Mali-born American citizen who lived there with his two wives. Both wives survived the fire; five of Mr. Magassa’s children perished. Under immigration law, polygamy is grounds for exclusion from America. Under New York law, Mr. Magassa could have gotten four years in prison. That will never happen.

No agency of government even attempts to count the number of polygamous unions in America. Typically, religious ceremonies happen in secret or publicly overseas. Polygamous wives (sister wives) arrive on visitor visas arranged by other relatives. Some husbands have one wife in America and others in Africa or Indonesia or the other Muslim countries.

A New York Times article titled “Polygamy, Practiced in Secrecy Follows Africans to New York” (NYTimes, 3/23/07, p.A1) tells us that

“. . . Immigration to New York and other American cities has soared from places where polygamy is lawful and widespread, especially from West African countries like Mali, where demographic surveys show that 43 percent of women are in polygamous marriages.
“And the picture that emerges from dozens of interviews with African immigrants, officials and scholars of polygamy is of a clandestine practice that probably involves thousands of New Yorkers.”

Isn’t it time to bring these loving heterosexuals out of the shadows? After all, can it be reasonably argued that these big-hearted families and their beautiful children are less deserving of the benefits of lawful marriage than all those gender-confused New York anal erotics who are always one genuine sex organ short of a full deck?

Dousson Traoré is the president of an association of women from Mali in New York. She is married to a man with two other wives in Mali. “Our mothers accepted it. Our grandmothers accepted it,” she said. “Why not us?” She does it because, “. . . it’s our religion.” Indeed.

Like America, France is now home to many polygamists. Studies of West African immigrants in France estimate that 120,000 Africans now live in France in 20,000 polygamous families. In liberal New York City where social welfare agencies are prohibited from asking about anyone’s immigration status, the attitude about polygamy is “don’t ask, don’t want to know.” In a city that prides itself on its tolerance of cultural and sexual peculiarities, welfare agents are clueless about how to deal with the reality of polygamous immigrants. Agencies that offer marriage counseling are dumbfounded by polygamy even though the city is now awash with sub-Saharan migrants.

The New York Times tells us that

“Islam is often cited as the authority that allows polygamy. But in Africa, the practice is a cultural tradition that crosses religious lines, while some Muslim lands elsewhere sharply restrict it. The Koran says a man should not take more than one wife if he cannot treat them all equally – a very high bar, many Muslims say.”

So what! Bill Gates could afford a hundred wives. Who are we to deny Bill and one hundred deserving women the right to live together in luxury? Didn’t Mr. Akuku Danger of Kenya have over a hundred wives? Is Mr. Akuku any more of a man than Bill Gates? Of course not! Wasn’t President Obama’s daddy from Kenya and wasn’t he a polygamist? You bettcha! If Barack’s daddy was all for polygamous marriage and if Barack Obama is all for homosexual wedlock, then how can Barack Obama be against heterosexual polygamy? If the gender part of the traditional definition of marriage is now dismissed as mere bigotry by Barack Obama, then surely this Harvard-educated man must see that the number part of that same definition is also mere bigotry. It’s time to scrap the arbitrary one-wife rule; it’s time for Barack to man-up and tell Michelle how it’s going to be!

The New York Times gave us this glowing report:

Ms. Traoré, of the Malian women’s group, cited two prosperous households in Bergen County, in New Jersey, that seemed to pass the test.
“They get along very well,” she said of the wives in one home, who married their husband in Africa at the same time. “It’s extraordinary. When they come to our celebrations they dress the same, the same outfit, the same jewels. The husband is completely fair.”
Still, since only one wife can have entered the country as a spouse, the other is probably more vulnerable to deportation, she acknowledged.

Exactly! Which is why these loving marriages must be protected from ruin by Obama’s jack-booted immigration agents. These loving wives need Obama’s Dream Act and they need it now; they also need the legally-sanctioned right of polygamous marriage. As it is, if these households break apart, the wives’ legal status is doubtful; there is precious little case law to guide the courts toward decisions about marriage property or benefits. Our president needs to speak up now for the rights of polygamists, or does he speak up only when his re-election campaign is being financed by deep-pocket homosexuals? One of every six of Obama’s big-bucks bundlers is a homosexual.

Mark Henkel is an evangelical Christian and the founder of TruthBearer.org , an evangelical polygamy organization that is in the vanguard of an emerging movement to decriminalize polygamy. His argument is simple and trenchant: If Heather can have two mommies, then why can’t Heather have two mommies and a daddy? Marlyne Hammon is asking the same question. Ms. Hammon was raised in a polygamous family and she is now in a polygamous marriage. She is also a founding member of the Centennial Park Action Committee, which lobbys to decriminalize polygamy. Both Hammon and Henkel have joined forces with other polygamy activist groups like Principle Voices, a Utah-based group run by wives of polygamous marriages. “Polygamy rights is the next civil-rights battle,” declared Mr. Henkel.

Back in 2003 liberals scoffed at Senator Rick Santorum when he predicted that the sweeping legalization of adult private behaviors would lead to such things as bigamy, polygamy or incest. The man was a prophet.

One-sex wedlock was the first culture-skewing consequence of the Lawrence v. Texas decision, which obliterated community standards of morality as a defense of the time-honored definition of marriage. After the homosexuals and their liberal enablers took a crowbar to the standard definition of marriage what was left of that definition was open to assault and battery by the advocates of plural marriage, be it heterosexual marriage or a frolicsome bathhouse full of married-to-each-other homosexuals. After the Lawrence decision any legal objections to plural marriage were rendered toothless.

Gay activists were the first to challenge the gender aspect of marriage; now polygamists are challenging the number aspect. If polygamists had launched the first attack, then it would be the gays who were pulling up the rear demanding their share of the ruined remains of what once defined a marriage. It’s just an accident of history that gays led the charge. Gays are not co-combatants with whom the polygamists want to be associated, for most of them are deeply religious Mormons, evangelical Christians or Muslims. The number of Muslim and evangelical Christian polygamists probably exceeds the number of polygamous Mormons. The polygamists’ naturally complementary relationships, bursting with children, more nearly captures the essence of a traditional marriage than does the typical homosexual union with its echo-chamber one-gender sameness, its lack of any nuanced gender counterpoint, and its basic format as a biological dead end. When it comes to normal gender role modeling, every gay marriage is a suffocating vacuum chamber. As a social institution with the capacity to contribute healthy future generations of American children, which is the first purpose of marriage, heterosexual polygamy beats “gay marriage” hollow. To legalize gay marriage anywhere in America and not decriminalize plural marriage is to reward a handful of gender-bent neurological oddballs at the expense of deeply religious neurologically-normal heterosexuals who now live in fear that monogamists, gay or straight, will threaten their marriages or snatch their children away from them.

Gays Have Paved the Way

This is the dawn of a rising polygamist movement. There was never a better moment to make the case for polygamist rights. All of the social-science strategies and all of the social-media tactics necessary for victory have already been modeled by homosexual activists. What the nascent Polygamist Rights Movement lacks is cohesion and focus; its scattered communities need to reach across their religious and cultural differences and join hands in this time of their common need.

The gay movement began with a single queer theorist who re-imagined homosexuals as an “oppressed minority.” Harry Hay’s manifesto, written at his kitchen table one evening in 1946, articulated the organizing principles of the first gay-rights organization, the Mattachine Society. This first group was the seedbed for future gay groups.

In 1987 the queer theorists Marshall Kirk and Erastes Pill published their strategic war plan “The Overhauling of Straight America” which articulated in graphic detail a complex and coordinated public-relations and media campaign to lull and groom normal Americans into believing that something as alien to their morals and customs as homosexuality was really “no big deal.” Gays were seeking to create a new alternative normal – a new alternative reality.

All of the tactics of that campaign are free for the taking; with only a tiny bit of tweaking the methods employed by gay activists will be useful to polygamists , with this one big difference: In the coming struggle polygamists will have an enormous advantage because they are essentially normal humans – their essence is normal heterosexuality.

Much of the black-letter text of the seminal queer theorists is devoted to instructing homosexuals how to conceal what gays do and think; gays are instructed to use deception; gays are instructed to defame and vilify their opponents and to stigmatize any counter argument as an expression of ignorance or bigotry.

Gays have the singular advantage of being evenly distributed at birth – every town includes a small percentage of homosexuals. These young gays and lesbians are now the organizing activists of the so-called “gay/straight” clubs and alliances now active in American high schools and colleges. These groups were encouraged by older gay activists as a way of grooming normal youngsters to accept homosexuality as “no big deal.” These school groups are a calculated part of a much bigger social agenda: “Win the kids, win the future.”

Polygamists don’t have the advantage of appearing randomly; polygamy is the expression of cultural or religious traditions, therefore polygamists tend to live in polygamous communities. The upside of polygamist isolation is that there are few Americans who have had a bad personal encounter with a polygamist. This cannot be said of homosexuals, for there are now hundreds of thousands of Americans who have been sexually victimized by homosexuals. Furthermore, polygamists don’t have to spin lies or vilify anyone; polygamists need not stoop to grooming anyone’s children with false history, intellectually-vacant emotional appeals, lies about homosexual predation, and nouveau-Marxist paradigms about how homosexuals are an “oppressed minority.”

To Hell with all of the Gay Movement’s fraud and bad faith! Heterosexual polygamists can make their case to America and to the courts with honest, persuasive shirtsleeve arguments. The campaign created by the queer theorists and the gay strategists is very effective but outrageously corrupt. That said, polygamists can learn much from gays about media exploitation, the craft of persuasion and the black magic of winning political friends. After that, the polygamists can advance their modest cause with honesty and a clear conscience. The way forward is crystal clear; all of the necessary conditions are in place. All it will take to ignite the social movement for heterosexual polygamy is for one visionary to emerge with an appealing paradigm and a persuasive polygamist manifesto. I could almost write them in my sleep.

Until this visionary arrives, the folks in every territory where one-sex wedlock is now legal are on notice: Now that the gender aspect of the traditional definition of marriage has been cast into the gutter where you live, the days of the number aspect of that definition are coming to an end. The voters of Maine, Maryland and Washington rolled the dice and gambled away their last defense against plural marriage. The three marriage modalities that are now legal – traditional, gay and lesbian – will be joined by a fourth modality: straight plural marriage. Prepare to meet your new neighbors.